The question of evil in the world runs throughout human history. Why? We all encounter some manifestations of evil sooner or later, but not absolute evil. And thank God, because we couldn’t bear it.

The Church celebrates the feast of the Cross of Jesus Christ with the great hope that comes from God and inspires our lives amidst hardships and suffering, showing that humanity exists for love and that evil does not have the last word.

A universal question

Under evil?,  Augustine of Hippo asked himself, and added that, if I am asked about good, I can answer something, but I cannot find an answer to that question about evil? Philosophers, too, continue to ask themselves the same question without an adequate answer, because evil needs good to act, it needs truth to sustain its lies, it needs beauty to impose its ugliness, it needs love to fuel hatred, it needs man to destroy his dignity, it needs God to affirm its negation.

Artists have dramatically expressed some manifestations of evil. Goya in the faceless executions and disasters of war; Picasso in the tragic Guernica; Munch in the inconsolable cry, and many others. Music, literature, and philosophy address evil with anxiety and find no definitive answers. Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, revealing its mask formed over emptiness; the incomprehensibility of Auschwitz; the genocide of Pol Pot and so many others led by tyrants like Hitler and Stalin, and closer to home, like Mao; the deportations and famines provoked; slavery. Etc. In his intelligence and heightened sensitivity, Zweig could not bear the decline of Europe due to the two wars and ended his life.

Job doesn’t understand

The Book of Job expresses the drama of a man who suffers with bewilderment, filled with questions that his friends only aggravate with their clumsy answers. He denies his existence and wishes for death. And yet, he manages to see a glimmer of hope because he knows God and knows that He cannot be evil, that all this suffering has a meaning. To his questions about evil, God answers him with other questions: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Who determined its dimensions or applied the measuring tape to it? Who shut in the sea with a door? Have you commanded the morning during his life, or appointed the dawn in its place? Have you entered the springs of the sea? Have they shown you the gates of death? Can you bind the ropes of the Pleiades or loose the reins of Orion? Do you hunt the lioness’s prey or satisfy the hunger of her cubs? In the end, Job responds: I knew you only by hearsay, but now my eyes have seen you; therefore, I retract and repent, cast into the pole and ashes.

And of course, the educational book based on real events ends well: Job lived another 140 years, and knew his children, and his grandchildren, and his great-grandchildren. He died an old man after a long life. The end is happy.

The mystery of human freedom

Faced with human freedom, some, like the existentialists, are distressed by the realization that it is real and makes us responsible for our actions and for our own lives, which are in no way determined. Another thing is the conditions that limit, but do not nullify, but rather shape that freedom as the reality of someone who is not God. This is an important issue because intelligence can dream of infinite freedom without limits, but it collides with the limits of life.

Many others experience the limits of human freedom and think it’s not such, merely an appearance, because we would be victims of fate, chance, fate, or evil gods. They see human life as a tragedy, or at least a drama with little room for maneuver.

Despite theories, every man and woman perceives that they live their life as they please, with limitations but with true freedom. History is full of free actors, heroes, leaders, and ordinary people who take responsibility for their successes and mistakes, their good deeds and sins, their virtues and vices, with the capacity to add or rectify, to achieve maturity and contribute to the common good.

The Bible is full of calls for freedom for every person, for it faces concrete good and evil, in ordinary and extraordinary actions. It would be pointless to appeal to a nonexistent freedom and therefore to an appropriate sanction in this life or in the next. [i] The gods created by men and their tragedies do not count on freedom, but rather determine the course of poor humankind. But this is not the case in the Judeo-Christian tradition, because the real God is good; he did not create evil; he created man free and helps him reach his full potential, although he respects his surprising capacity for evil. History is full of these fateful decisions, of hatred, as it is also full of saints heroic in love.

Christianity knows who man is, what his origin and purpose are, his real life and the transcendence of his actions. The Catechism teaches who man is, called to full love, and shows the experience of the human condition because he comes from God, he is a beloved creature capable of love, called to eternal happiness earned through free works in this world, the path to eternal life: consistent with the human dignity that no other creature on earth can have [ii].

Evil is not an idea

From the very beginning of history, human beings have responded to love or consciously rejected it. God is the Creator who loves freedom and calls every human being with the mission of completing creation, working to give love and receive love.

When we speak of evil, we know that it is not an abstraction, but rather a vital experience of personal sin and its harm to one’s neighbor within society, within the family, within friendship. It is not necessary to scientifically prove that evil exists, for we encounter it daily, we encounter it in society, and we know it throughout history. And the teaching of Sacred Scripture on original sin seems very true and sensible. It certainly raises some problems, but its denial raises even more problems.

The Christian faith teaches that evil originates in human freedom and in the superior freedom of the devil, a being created out of love who became hate, a good creature who became evil in opposition to God the Creator. Satan’s existence may seem simple to our intelligence, but this is not the case when we understand his degree of freedom and intelligence, which makes him supremely responsible for his decisions. It is certainly a mystery that invites us not to be superficial in our lives.

In the face of the pain caused by Satan and men, we often find no comforting answers, although we can always look up, not to complain, but to decide to do something more. When faced with a victim, a wounded person, a child, the most human thing to do is to stand by and hold the hand that gives hope. We Christians know how to look to Jesus Christ on the cross, where we find the vital answer to pain and questions.

Light from art

Among other artists, Roger van der Weyden was able to express the pain, acceptance, and redemption wrought by Jesus Christ in the Calvary seen in the monastery of El Escorial.

A blood-red background, a Christ hanging meekly, a courageous mother who accompanies and suffers without tragedy, and a young John who also weeps. There is pain, but there is meaning, there is mystery and redemption, there is drama at Calvary, but no tragedy. There is certainty and divine balance in a representation that is comfort to the beholder. And the same occurs in countless representations of Jesus Christ crucified for men, who forgives and offers himself, who takes on all human suffering in his Passion. There are countless crucifixes of wood, stone, ivory, bronze, silver, and gold that teach more than any philosophy, any protest, or any despair.

Velázquez also captured in his Crucifixion in the Prado Museum the serenity of the dead Christ, who speaks to the heart and answers any question about the parasitic reality of evil and, above all, about the meaning of human suffering. An intellectual, unsentimental man, he wrote his poem, moved by this Christ who speaks volumes. A small sample of Unamuno’s verses is sufficient:

What are you thinking about, dead Christ?
Why does that veil of dark night
from your abundant, black
Nazarene hair fall upon your brow?
You look within yourself, where the kingdom
of God is; within yourself, where
the eternal sun of living souls dawns.

(…) final prayer

You who are silent, O Christ, to hear us,
hear the sobs from our breasts;
receive our complaints, the groans
from this valley of tears. We cry out
to You, Christ, Jesus, from the depths
of our abyss of human misery,
and You, the white summit of humanity,
give us the waters of Your snows.

Just as the seed of resurrection and new life was already present on the cross, so it is also in the moments of our journey that are perhaps darker: we can ask the Lord for his light that dispels the darkness and anticipates, like the dawn, the splendor of the clear day.

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[i]  See Gen 1:27; Gen 3,1-13; Dt 30,11; Psalm 32; Jn 8,34; Rom 6:16; Rom 8:20; Ga 5.1

[ii]  CIgC, nn. 1730-1749; nn.396-421.